“The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense.

While the membership does not believe statements made for public consumption, it believes all the more fervently the standard clichés… In contrast to the movements’ tactical lies which change literally from day to day, these ideological lies are supposed to be believed like sacred untouchable truths…

[I]ts members’ whole education is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose. In distinction to the mass membership which, for instance, needs some demonstration of the inferiority of the Jewish race before it can safely be asked to kill Jews, the elite formations understand that the statement, all Jews are inferior, means, all Jews should be killed; they know that when they are told that only Moscow has a subway, the real meaning of the statement is that all subways should be destroyed…”

Questioner: Was there more civility among politicians in the early years of the Republic?

Gore Vidal: Well that’s not what they’re there for. Civility among politicians is oxymoronic – they’re supposed to be awful. And that’s part of the fun of it; if they’re going to talk about real issues and they care about real issues, then they get to really hate each other and they talk rather savagely.

In past generations, they could actually talk. As opposed to politicians today, they could actually speak without reading – hesitantly – a speech somebody else had written for them.

As I once said of General Eisenhower: he always read his speeches with a sense of real discovery. He was terribly interested in some of things he was reading. There was a great moment during the campaign of ’52, when he said, ‘And, if elected President, I will go to… Korea!’ And he went. Nobody’d told him. And he had to go.

John Meacham: If our country itself is irreconcilably polarized, then in classic republican — lowercase “r” — thinking, that is going to be reflected in our political system.

David Brooks: I’m coming around to that view, which I was very resistant to over the last ten years. A lot of people have argued that [polarization] begins out in the country, not in Washington. I guess I more or less accept that now.

And I think it’s a moral failing that we all share. Which is that if you have a modest sense of your own rightness, and if you think that politics is generally a competition between half-truths, then you’re going to need the other people on the other side, and you’re going to value the similarity of taste. You know, you may disagree with a Republican, or disagree with a Democrat, but you’re still American and you still basically share the same culture. And you know your side is half wrong.

If you have that mentality that ‘Well, I’m probably half wrong; he’s probably half right,’ then it’s going to be a lot easier to come to an agreement. But if you have an egotistical attitude that ‘I’m 100% right and they’re 100% wrong,’ which is a moral failing — a failing of intellectual morality — then it’s very hard to come to an agreement.

And I do think that we’ve had a failure of modesty about our own rightness and wrongness. And I’m in the op-ed business, so believe me that people like me have contributed as much as anybody to this moral failure. But I think it has built up gradually and has become somewhat consuming.

__________

David Brooks and Jon Meacham, in conversation when Meacham subbed for Charlie Rose this summer.

“But in order to maintain the Union unimpaired, it is absolutely necessary that the laws passed by the constituted authorities should be faithfully executed in every part of the country, and that every good citizen should at all times stand ready to put down, with the combined force of the nation, every attempt at unlawful resistance, under whatever pretext it may be made or whatever shape it may assume…

You have no longer any cause to fear danger from abroad; your strength and power are well known throughout the civilized world, as well as the high and gallant bearing of your sons. It is from within, among yourselves, from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition, and inordinate thirst for power, that factions will be formed and liberty endangered… You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you, as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in his hands the destinies of nations make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts, and pure hands, and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time the great charge He has committed to your keeping.

My own race is nearly run; advanced age and failing health warn me that before long I must pass beyond the reach of human events and cease to feel the vicissitudes of human affairs. I thank God that my life has been spent in a land of liberty, and that he has given me a heart to love my country with the affection of a son. And filled with gratitude for your constant and unwavering kindness, I bid you a last and affectionate farewell.”

__________

Excerpted from Andrew Jackson’s 1837 Farewell Address. This speech was given to mark Jackson’s retirement from both the presidency and public life. He would spend the remainder of his life at his home in Nashville, where he died in 1845.

The first section of these elevated words came bounding into my mind this morning as I watched coverage of Cliven Bundy’s Nevada saga debated by a panel of experts on CNN. That this stand-off is happening is strange enough; that it’s being discussed in earnest by talking heads on major networks is positively surreal. If there is anything worth saying about this self-parodying story it’s this: arming a militia is not a substitute for settling your grievances with fellow citizens, government, or law through established legal channels. For twenty years, Bundy grazed 900 cattle on 600,000 acres of public land, and he’s racked up a million-dollar tab. Obviously he doesn’t want to pay, but that money is owed — owed to the American taxpayer. If Bundy, his friends, or anyone else in Nevada had an issue with the Bureau of Land Management or the proportion of land aggregated to the Federal Government in their state, then they could have made their beef known on the streets and eventually on ballots and/or bills. Instead, as numerous sources have described, they only now decided to grab their rifles, form a barricade… and “put all the women up at the front.” Real honorable, guys.

While being interviewed by Sean Hannity last week, Bundy compared himself and his gang to the Minutemen of the American Revolution. Hannity apparently didn’t see anything objectionable in this claim, nodding in agreement as if it’s inherently legitimate to challenge taxation and the powers that be, so long as you do it with a cowboy hat, gun, and accent. But it’s not. The rule of law is not a slogan, nor is threatening federal agents with violence a game. John Adams wasn’t prattling like a pundit when he observed we are a nation of laws not a nation of men. Folks like Bundy are fond of railing against the takers in our society who depend on forms of government assistance like food stamps. But Bundy has literally and knowingly been mooching off of the federal government for two decades, only to now be feigning confusion and outrage when the bill, visible from miles away, comes due.

Andrew Sullivan: Look, obviously apart from the Clinton machine sitting there ready to take over, I don’t see anything on either side right now that seems even faintly in the game.

I mean I might have said Christie, but I think at this point no sane person would want that kind of personality in charge of any greater sort of power. Because once you’re wired that way, you’re just not a President. And I say that as someone who was kind of hoping for some kind of moderate, Northeastern Republican in 2016.

But I just can’t see [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich, or [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker; or on the Democratic side, who’s going to go up against it? [Maryland Gov. Martin] O’Malley? [New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo?

So what’s going to happen, John? Predict. Because if we’re going to face another Clinton era, I’m gonna need some help.

John Heilemann: Tell me something I don’t know. It’s a very unusual circumstance.

Just as a matter of brute political reality, in many ways she is better situated to be the Democratic nominee than a sitting President would be, in the sense that she has almost all the assets for incumbency and yet she doesn’t actually have to run the government. She is free to be a candidate, but she has all the pro weight of incumbency – she has the record, now, of an incumbent. She’s very much attached to this administration; she’ll be seen as part of it if she runs, with all the attendant benefits in terms of the nomination that that entails.

Much of the Democratic party, having nominated an African-American, now thinks it’s time for there to be a woman nominee. She has extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of loyalty from the constituencies that choose Democratic nominees: women, Latin Americans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, union households – she has strength in all of those communities. Pick an important Democratic nominating constituency, she is incredibly strong with all of them.

She is the only Democrat who can really raise money, if she’s in the race. If she’s not in the race, the donor class is all over the place. But if she runs, she locks up a vast chunk of the Democratic voter base. Beyond health issues or some self-inflicted scandal — or Bill’s health or some potential scandal he could be involved in — she effectively will win the Democratic nomination by acclamation.

But I don’t think that anyone will run against her. Biden will not run if she runs, I believe. Cuomo will not run if she runs. Martin O’Malley has said he will not run if she runs… Who is going to take her on? It doesn’t mean she’s going to be President, but it means that if she wants to be the Democratic nominee, she is close to unstoppable.

AS: How psychologically crippling would it be for the Republicans to lose two elections to Obama, and then lose the next one to Hillary Clinton? Would you not want to just pack up and go home at that point?

JH: The talk of there being a Republican “Civil War” is not radically exaggerated. It has lost five of the last six general elections at the level of the popular vote, and if you look at where the Republican party stands right now with the American electorate, the only thing that’s keeping it afloat is Obama’s weakness, which is real… The party is radically out of touch with the rising demographic forces in the country, and with what the policy implications of those changes are.

I think that most of the Republicans that people talk about as potential nominees are a joke compared to Hillary Clinton.

Who’s the strongest Republican candidate right now? You know, it’s probably Jeb Bush. And there are big issues with Jeb Bush.

But if the Republican party is going to win, they have to find someone who the establishment donor class wing of the party is really behind, and believes can win; and that the Tea Party cultural wing of the party can be energized for. Someone who fuses those two things together, and someone who can talk to the so-called “coalition of the ascendant” (minorities and single women) – not necessarily get a majority of them, but still not get only 27% of the Hispanic vote. Because you can’t win a national election with 27%; you have to get 37, 38% of the Hispanic vote, and Jeb Bush is someone who can conceivably do those three things.

I’m not saying he’s a perfect candidate, but right now, he is someone who could conceivably do those things. Can Paul Ryan do those things? I don’t think so, and I don’t think he’s going to run. Can Scott Walker do those things? That’s kind of a stretch. I mean, have you spent much time with Scott Walker? His a fine Midwestern governor – “fine” in the sense of his political skills, just as a candidate. But is he a major league ball player who can go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton?

This is like during the last cycle when people would say Tim Pawlenty may have a shot; and I would say, ‘have you been with Tim Pawlenty?’ Like, he’s a really good guy, and he was a successful governor of Minnesota, but you watch him – and I hate to use sports analogies – but it’s like a really good AA player, and you’re going to go out and play against Barack Obama? It’s ridiculous. A very good minor league player, who you’re going to put out on the field to hit against Sandy Koufax.

Rand Paul? Ted Cruz? Obviously not plausible to win.

AS: Not plausible?

JH: Not plausible to win a national election. Could one of those guys, in a very fragmented Republican field, and especially now with the way they’re building the Republican nomination process, could one of them win the nomination? It’s not impossible. But they will not be President of the United States.

AS: But if you win Iowa and New Hampshire [in the primaries], you’re kind of set.

JH: Yeah, you can run the table.

AS: I’ll end on this — what does it say about America that we could be looking towards the most plausible scenario, of the most viable race in 2016, is a Clinton against a Bush?

JH: It says that America, very firmly, deeply, profoundly, and broadly believes it’s time for a change.

This new feature is exclusively for subscribing members of the site, and along with the additional resources offered by The Dish, it is well worth the $20 price of a yearly subscription. The site is a current events and cultural hub that covers issues deeply and widely, and is serious but does not take itself too seriously. It’s among the first news resources I check each day. Plus, Sullivan is, in addition to an almost perfectly fluent writer, a commentator whose opinions are decidedly fresh, attentive, and apartisan. His conversation with Heilemann runs over an hour and a half, with this particular portion being just the final 3 minutes.

“He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. ‘Ye shall know the truth,’ says Jesus, ‘and the truth shall set you free.’ Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal…

Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition…

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love…

America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State — they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away…

And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.'”

As a small note: King was channeling John F. Kennedy when he cited Dante above. In 1963, when he was signing the charter that established the German Peace Corps in Bonn, West Germany, Kennedy remarked, “Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” This comment is probably based on a simplistic reading of the third canto of The Inferno.

But since I’ve just slogged through the relevant part of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Dante, I feel I can be petty enough to say that both King and Kennedy seem to have never picked up The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s vision of the underworld, it is traitors — not cowards or equivocators — who get it the worst. In Kokytos, the ninth and final circle of the underworld, there are four concentric rings, starting with Caina, for traitors to blood relatives (hence, “Cain”), and ending with Judecca, for those who are traitorous to their masters. I’ll let you infer the namesake of that circle. And one more thing, the punishment isn’t fire; it’s ice.

…Well, that got morbid. Back to King. His opposition to Vietnam was so unwavering and so cogent. Dissent is not disloyalty; but, then as now, people don’t seem to get that. They assume that supporting government policy, even in its most baseless and ruinous permutations, is equatable to supporting the people whom government is tasked with representing. And as one of the vast majority of Americans who explicitly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can’t help but overlay his comments atop the decade-high pile of imperial waste we have just burned through.

Watch a short clip of King discussing Muhammad Ali in the context of the Vietnam War:

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…

Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.

He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.

He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”

“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…

Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”

About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.

I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.

Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.

“Tragedy without reason? But was there anything in the universe without reason? The question echoed: ‘Why, God?’ For an agnostic the murder of John Kennedy seemed one more expression of the ultimate fortuity of things. But for those who believed in a universe infused by the Almighty with pattern and purpose—as the Kennedys did—Dallas brought on a philosophical as well as an emotional crisis. Robert Kennedy in particular had to come to terms with his brother’s death before he could truly resume his own existence.

In these dark weeks and months, on solitary walks across wintry fields, in long reverie at his desk in the Department of Justice, in the late afternoon before the fire in Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown drawing room, in his reading—now more intense than ever before, as if each next page might contain the essential clue—he was struggling with that fundamental perplexity: whether there was, after all, any sense to the universe. His faith had taught him there was. His experience now raised the searching and terrible doubt. If it were a universe of pattern, what divine purpose had the murder of a beloved brother served? An old Irish ballad haunted him.

Sheep without a shepherd;
When the snow shuts out the sky—
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?

He scrawled on a yellow sheet:

The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.

and

All things are to be examined & called into question—
There are no limits set to thought.”

“The question arose whether the coffin should be open or closed. The casket arrived at the White House early in the morning of the twenty-third. After a brief service in the East Room, ‘I (Robert) asked everybody to leave and I asked them to open it… When I saw it, I’d made my mind up. I didn’t want it open.’…

He spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom. Charles Spalding went with him and said, ‘There’s a sleeping pill around somewhere.’ Spalding found a pill. Robert Kennedy said, ‘God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well.’ He was still controlled. Spalding closed the door. ‘Then I just heard him break down…. I heard him sob and say, “Why, God?”’

He lay fitfully for an hour or two. Soon it was daylight. He walked down the hall and came in on Jacqueline, sitting on her bed in a dressing gown, talking to the children. Young John Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his father. His older sister, Caroline, said that Daddy was too big for his coffin…

Robert Kennedy sent a letter to each of his children and told his sisters to do likewise. He wrote his son Joe:

On the day of the burial
of your Godfather
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Nov. 24, 1963
Dear Joe,

You are the oldest of all the male grandchildren. You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill.
Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.

Love to you
Daddy

He appeared, I noted the day after Dallas, ‘composed, withdrawn and resolute.’ Ben Bradlee the same day saw him ‘clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken.’ Discipline and duty summoned him to the occasion. Within he was demolished. ‘It was much harder for him than anybody,’ said LeMoyne Billings, his friend of so many years. He had put ‘his brother’s career absolutely first; and not anything about his own career whatsoever. And I think that the shock of losing what he’d built everything around … aside from losing the loved figure … was just absolutely [devastating]—he didn’t know where he was…. Everything was just pulled out from under him.’ They had been years of fulfillment, but of derivative fulfillment: fulfillment not of himself but of a brother and a family. Now in a crazed flash all was wiped out. ‘Why, God?’

Robert Kennedy was a desperately wounded man. ‘I just had the feeling,’ said John Seigenthaler, ‘that it was physically painful, almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack. I mean it was pain and it showed itself as being pain…. It was very obvious to me, almost when he got up to walk that it hurt to get up to walk.’ Everything he did was done through a ‘haze of pain.’ ‘He was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,’ said Pierre Salinger. ‘He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself.’ Douglas Dillon offered him his house in Hobe Sound, Florida, where Robert and Ethel went with a few friends at the end of the month. They played touch football —‘really vicious games,’ Salinger recalled. ‘… It seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down.’

Sardonic withdrawal seemed to distance the anguish. Seigenthaler went out to Hickory Hill after the funeral. ‘Obviously in pain, [Robert] opened the door and said something like this, “Come on in, somebody shot my brother, and we’re watching his funeral on television.” When Helen Keyes arrived from Boston to help with his mail, ‘I didn’t want to see him; I just figured I’d dissolve; and I walked in and he said, “Come in.” I said, “All right.” And he said to me, “Been to any good funerals lately?” Oh, I almost died, and yet once he said that it was out in the open, and, you know, we just picked up and went on from there.’ Senator Herbert Lehman of New York died early in December. Robert Kennedy, in New York for the services, said to his Milton friend Mary Bailey Gimbel, ‘I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.’

Friends did their best. John Bartlow Martin, retiring as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, went to say goodbye. ‘How his face had aged in the years I’d known him.’ Martin attempted a few words of comfort. ‘With that odd tentative half-smile, so well known to his friends, so little to others, he murmured…‘Well, three years is better than nothing.’ Peter Maas arrived from New York on the first day the Attorney General went out publicly—to a Christmas party arranged by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star for an orphanage.

The moment he walked in the room, all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence…. Bob stepped into the middle of the room and just then a little black boy—I don’t suppose he was more than six or seven years old—suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s deadl Your brother’s dead!’ … The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away…. The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”

“Jack’s greatest success in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be ‘a lady’s man’…

Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction… ‘I can’t help it,’ he declared with evident self-pleasure [in a letter to an adolescent friend] . ‘It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.’…

Jack’s easy conquests compounded the feeling that, like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class, he was entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly, even gratefully, from the object of his immediate affection. Furthermore, there did not have to be a conflict between private fun and public good. David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a 1939 biography of Queen Victoria’s prime minister, depicted young British aristocrats performing heroic feats in the service of queen and country while privately practicing unrestrained sexual indulgence with no regard for the conventional standards of monogamous marriages or premarital courting. Jack would later say that it was one of his two favorite books.

One woman reporter remembered that Jack ‘didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.’ After Harvard, when he spent a term in the fall of 1940 at Stanford (where, unlike at Harvard, men and women attended classes together), he wrote Lem Billings: ‘Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.’

But restraint was usually not the order of the day. He had so many women, he could not remember their names; ‘Hello, kid,’ was his absentminded way of greeting a current amour. Stories are legion — no doubt, some the invention of imagination, but others most probably true — of his self-indulgent sexual escapades. ‘We have only fifteen minutes,’ he told a beautiful co-ed invited to his hotel room during a campaign stop in 1960. ‘I wish we had time for some foreplay,’ he told another beauty he dated in the 1950s… At a society party in New York he asked the artist William Walton how many women in the gathering of socialites he had slept with. When Walton gave him ‘a true count,’ Jack said, ‘Wow, I envy you.’ Walton replied: ‘Look, I was here earlier than you were.’ And Jack responded, ‘I’m going to catch up.'”